Towards the end of this week’s episode of Hasan Minhaj’s Netflix /zigman2/quotes/202353025/compositeNFLX+1.27%
show “Patriot Act,” viewers are presented with a comedic sketch that illustrates the obstacles many borrowers face paying their student loans better than allegations buried in court documents, complaint databases and the media ever could.

Mark and Shannon are contestants on a fictional game show. The prize? Having their student debt paid off. It’s a riff on an actual game show with that premise. The fictional couple is saddled with the private student-loan debt of their son, who died in a parkour
accident.

‘I don’t want to be the forbearer of bad news, but forbearance actually increases your interest over time. An income-based repayment plan would be more fiscally responsible.’

—Comedian John Hodgman on his fictional student-loan game show

Comedian John Hodgman, the show’s host, asks the bereaved parents, “In the long term, is it better to be in an income-based repayment plan or forbearance?” for a chance to win $15,000 off their son’s debt. They use one of their lifelines — a call to their student-loan company — where a representative tells them, “Forbearance, that’s the best option, I would go with that.”

Naturally, that’s the answer they give Hodgman.

His response: “I don’t want to be the forbearer of bad news, but forbearance actually increases your interest over time. An income-based repayment plan would be more fiscally responsible.” The two are ushered off the game show with no student loan help.

That moment mirrors allegations in several lawsuits from state attorneys general and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, alleging student-loan companies steer borrowers towards forbearance to save themselves time and money instead of doing what’s required to help them into the repayment plan that makes the most sense for them.

Several lawsuits allege student-loan companies steer borrowers towards forbearance to save themselves time and money, instead of doing what’s required to help them into the repayment plan.

And it’s one of many throughout the 28-minute show
where Minhaj and his writing team use comedy to expose one factor that borrower advocates say is exacerbating our nation’s $1.5 trillion student-loan problem — student-loan companies’ conduct, which they say is enabled by the Department of Education’s lax oversight.

It’s widely acknowledged that stagnant wages and rising college costs are saddling today’s young people with debt loads that would have been unfathomable in their parents’ generation. But the “Patriot Act” episode is one of the few pop culture artifacts to highlight the repayment experience.

Minhaj, the 33-year-old comedian perhaps best known for his four-year stint as a correspondent on “The Daily Show” and his viral 2017 appearance
at the White House Correspondents dinner, said in an interview that student debt was one of the most requested topics fans of “Patriot Act” asked the show to cover.

“The key thing that we were trying to figure out is what’s our in? How do we talk about this?” he said. “When our news team started looking into loan servicers that’s really where the story broke open for us.”

MarketWatch photo illustration/iStockphoto, Getty Images

Over the course of his research, Minhaj said he began to understand the role of the Department of Education and the student-loan companies it hires in our nation’s student-loan problem. Upon discovering that the Department is the biggest bank in terms of lending, Minhaj said he had a “Wow, how did I not know that, moment.”

But the Department “outsourcing their job to loan servicers was the beginning of how I really wanted to show how this system has become broken,” he said.

The show is particularly critical of student-loan giant Navient, which is facing lawsuits in several states over allegations the company mistreated student-loan borrowers. The company says these claims are false
. As a way to explain to viewers the harm caused by Navient’s alleged practice of steering student-loan borrowers towards forbearance, Minhaj uses a familiar analogy.

Income-based repayment, which allows borrowers to pay off their debt as a percentage of their income, is like Hinge, an online dating site, which uses connections with Facebook /zigman2/quotes/205064656/compositeFB+1.98%
friends to make matches, Minhaj says. “It takes more time to fill out, but it’s reliable,” he says. Forbearance, which temporarily pauses payments, but allows interest to build, is more like Tinder /zigman2/quotes/205118493/compositeIAC+0.98%
, he says. “It’s quick and easy, but over time you end up regretting it.”

The show is particularly critical of student-loan giant Navient, which is facing lawsuits in several states over allegations the company mistreated student-loan borrowers.

In addition to the deep-dive into the allegations against Navient, Minhaj walks viewers through the history of the student-loan program and companies’ role in it to show how far we’ve come from the program’s original goal of beefing up our educated workforce and making college possible for any student regardless of financial need.

To make his point, Minhaj uses a combination of jokes, examples of borrowers spurned by their student-loan companies, including a disabled man whose student-loan company auto-debited his monthly student-loan payment twice from his bank account, and interviews with student-loan company critics like Seth Frotman, the former student loan ombudsman at the CFPB.

Minhaj managed to avoid the experience of student-loan repayment by living at home while attending the University of California-Davis. But he said he’s watched friends, relatives and even members of his audience — there was roughly $6 million worth of student debt spread among the fans who watched the episode taping — struggle with student debt of their own.

Part of what he hopes the episode achieves is putting those challenges in context of the obstacles borrowers face repaying their debt.

There is a stigma attached to debt, he said. “It’s like a black spot on your permanent record in terms of whether or not you are a responsible adult,” Minhaj told MarketWatch. “It couldn’t be further from the truth.”

After highlighting some of these roadblocks, Minhaj — dressed as a caricature of a college freshman in a white fuzzy Supreme hat, Beats By Dre /zigman2/quotes/202934861/compositeAAPL+2.85%
headphones and smoking a vape — asks Frotman what college freshman need to know as they embark on their schooling.

“You need to realize that once you leave school you need to be on top of some pretty horrific companies,” Frotman tells him.

That young adults are saddled with this obligation is troubling, Minhaj said. “To expect the average student who has so many responsibilities and has so many things on their plate to navigate this without proper information — it’s asking a lot.”

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